Driving into Washington New Town, just a few miles
south of Newcastle, is peculiarly out of context when compared to my
other experiences of old Geordieland. It is almost a Little Los
Angeles. A network of de luxe new highways interconnect scattered
buildings over a vast area, and everyone appears to travel by car
(public transport seems to be incidental rather than an absolute
necessity at present). In the town centre most social and commercial
amenities are provided in one giant enclosed precinct called The
Galleries. This includes shops, pubs, legal advisers, libraries,
local government offices - the lot. It also includes the town's
Information Centre, part of which was taken over by the local
Biddick Farm Arts Centre to stage the Artists' Video exhibition. The
Biddick Centre is grant-aided by Northern Arts, Sunderland Borough
Council and the Arts Council of GB, and Brian Hoey and Wendy Brown,
its present Artists in Residence, were the initiators of this show.
Hoey, Brown and Rosemary Herd, the Visual Arts officer of the
Biddick Centre, undoubtedly worked very hard -in a climate not
particularly well-attuned to art shows of any sort, let alone video-
to produce one of the few shows of this kind to appear anywhere in
Britain.

Even though the show was very much an international
affair (including tapes from the US, Canada, Switzerland, Sweden and
some of the best from Britain), the national press typically ignored
it, presumably on the grounds that it was in such an 'obscure'
locale. This is ironic at a time when everyone is clamouring for
greater attention to art activities in the regions. Even William
Feaver, who wrote the catalogue foreword (blundering a little-but
acceptable), made not the slightest whisper of a mention of it in
his Observer column. The local press, forever looking for a
cheap thrill and a quick sell, made no serious attempt to discover
what it was all about but instead jumped headlong into a totally
unfounded Customs' suspicion that they were importing a blue movie
from Sweden in the form of Ronald Nameth's tape The Adventures
of Energy (music by Terry Riley). The local radio did a hurried
two-minute interview with Hoey and Herd on an early morning
breakfast show, and local TV was nowhere to be seen. Despite this
dearth of media publicity audiences were quite good, showing a lot
of interest and asking a lot of questions.

A fair proportion of the tapes on show had that
seductive, though mostly cosmetic, appeal of electronic trickery
produced with colourisers, complicated special effects generators,
chroma-key circuits, video-synthesisers and the like. In fairness to
those artists who are aware of the dangers, I must say here that it
is extremely difficult to offer a generalised complaint about work
such as this- only that much of it truly reads as the now proverbial
moving wallpaper. The intention so often seems to be based purely on
exploring kinetic image invention for its own sake, where the prime
objective appears to be to gain access to more and more
sophisticated means with less and less concern for the implications
of doing it. Certainly it rarely does anything to extend the now
well-established 'principles' peculiar to institutionalised TV. To
quote from an earlier article: 'Almost without exception tapes in
this genre present complex synthetic imagery which, while not a
normal experience on broadcast TV, tends if anything to corroborate
the mystique convention by the (obsessive) development, deification
and utilisation of increasingly sophisticated hardware available to,
and operable by, only a few. Equally, this in turn produces the
inevitable obscuration of any immediately perceivable evidence of
the creative process.'[1]

Woody and Steina Vasulka (US) were the two artists
in the show perhaps most totally absorbed in electronic wizardry,
and since I am so diametrically opposed to their work let it suffice
to quote their catalogue entry for one of their tapes as an
illustration of my point: 'The Matter-a dot pattern with
its raster is displayed on a scan processor. Three basic waves,
sine, triangles and square, generated by a locked waveform
generator, are applied to shape the display. A slow ramp generator
controls the size and image drift.' Alternatively, Doron Abrahami
(GB), avoiding this technical jargonese, commits himself to the core
of the matter (inadvertently aligning his intentions with the dictum
of the broadcasters) by stating: 'I have tried to explore the
possibilities provided by sophisticated TV equipment, to create a
kinetic entertaining video-tape, set to music.' Pleasant, but highly
soporific. However, it would be quite out o place to hint at a
general condemnation of the show on the strength of my comments so
far. Tapes by John Freeman (Canada), Genevieve Calame (Switzerland),
Brian Hoey (GB) and to some degree Cliff Evans (GB) all involved
synthetic 'abstraction', which proved with careful consideration
that it is possible to manifest ideas which extend beyond the
eclectic amorphous dream-state of outmoded psychedelia (Dewitt,
Donebauer), or glossy and hard-edged 'computed' animation (Vasulkas,
Emschwiller).

Moving on from the synthesised work, I was very
disappointed in Ira Schneider's (US) tape More or Less Related
Incidents in Recent History . However hard I tried I could not
see it as more than an ad hoc compilation of off-air shots of Nixon,
Vietnam, Cambodia, Rock stars and, as he states, 'other brief clips
from broadcast TV which typify our age'. These were interspersed
with colour portapak shots of a New York boutique being decorated.
As a rather slender insight into the American
'media/political/rock/alternative culture' I suppose it was OK. But
for a video artist of Schneider's reputation to get off on the 'junk
footage and roving camera routine' was in my view a slight on his
proven capabilities.

Ture Sjölander and Bror Wikström (Sweden) showed three
tapes: Time, Monument and Space in the Brain . I
was particularly interested to see Time (1965-6) since this was one
of the first experimental tapes to be broadcast. And their subtly
structured nudging and twisting of familiar broadcast imagery (by
carefully distorting the video scan-line raster) induces a very
particular reappraisal of the Telly conventions. It is certainly an
historical landmark in the development of video art. Their statement
about broadcast TV is as applicable now as it was then: '...pictures
have not attained more than a purely illustrative function ...
because most of the pictures are created by Word-people. In fact,
roughly half the items on TV today could just as well be broadcast
on radio instead.'

John Hopkins and Sue Hall (GB) presented a
compilation entitled Albion Free State which included one
or two slightly bizarre experiments and some important controversial
documentation (which I have always suspected they are better
disposed towards than the former) like Squat Now While the
Stocks Last . Other British work included Aidanvision's
Figure in an Interior which was the record of a staged
situation in which an (unmistakable) actor was confronted with a
Logan's Run simulated-computer-style interrogation. The
initial concept suggested many of the inherent psychological and
philosophical issues which have emerged with the one-way systems of
present-day media presentation. In its realisation the resultant
tape employed too obviously the very tactics and traditional
techniques of those systems which I assume it sought to question.
Viewers remained passive and external to the performance-voyeuristic
rather than integral to the process.

However, that particular tape aside, Aidanvision
(situated in Carlisle) is headed by Roy Thompson and is one of the
rare independent studios in this country which, to quote,
'concentrates on the experimental use of the medium, in the context
of commitment to art'. Artists in that region and from beyond are
apparently welcome to use its facilities.

Tapes were also shown by Tamara Krikorian, Steve
Partridge, Stuart Marshall, Tony Sinden, David Critchley, and
myself. Some of these I have discussed before. Krikorian showed an
adaption for single screen of her multi-monitor installation
Breeze (1975). Partridge presented five works, the most
successful being Interlace (1975) which, by systematically
over-modulating, rolling, mixing, freezing, etc the video image from
an off-air discussion, insists on the viewing experience having a
'televisual autonomy' bringing into question the re-presentation
convention as adopted by broadcasters. This is very
much an extension of Sjölander and Wikström's concern, hinted at ten
years earlier in their tape Time .Stuart Marshall, though handling his work somewhat
differently, comes to similar conclusions when he says that his
tapes called Go Through the Motions , Just a Glimpse
and Arcanum all examine the interrelations of the
image and sound tracks and challenge the notion that any system of
representation can simply re-present'. Go Through the Motions
(1975) is probably the earliest of his tapes shown, yet for me
remains one of the strongest. Briefly, it shows a close-up of his
mouth throughout the duration apparently repeating the words 'Saying
one thing and meaning another' (in fact he is miming to a
pre-recorded sound loop). As his lips attempt to synchronise with
the sound they purposefully move almost imperceptibly in and out of
phase with it. The viewer is, almost hynotically, induced into at
once attempting to assimilate sound and vision according to his
preconditioned subconscious, yet simultaneously conscious of the
purposeful disparity, not only of sound and vision but of system and
actual context.